The Community Blog for Business Analysts

Business Rules

It may sound routine, but the importance of operational decisions cannot be underestimated. After all, not a day goes by without even the smallest business making dozens, if not hundreds of operational decisions that may affect the bottom line. Elevate these to large scale companies and we are talking thousands, if not millions of actions that impa...

Let me start by saying that a business rule is far more granular than a business decision, and that the two should never be confused. Today, it is an unfortunate fact that some vendors would have potential clients believe that there is synergy between business rules and business decisions. Perhaps this is because in an effort to differentiate one b...

There are many definition of business rules and the one that I really like is that business rules are:
Criterion used to:
Guide conduct or actions.
Shape judgments of behavior.
Make decisions.
Ronald Ross
Having this definition in mind, let’s see what challenges a traditional rules management system w...

Decision Model and Notation in short DMN is a novel way to model business decisions. DMN allows capturing and modeling business decisions in a way that is easy to understand with business people and subject matter experts. It is a combination of:
Decision requirement diagram – DRD
Decision table
Boxed expressions
Fr...

Decision model and notation (DMN) is a nice way to model policies and make sure your business rules are implemented properly. Opposite to traditional approach in business rules which was the focus on the rules them selves, in DMN we start from decisions.
Let’s work on a tangible example. In an employees benefits and entitlement system, you...

Nowhere is the need to implement and manage
change more acute than within government agencies, nonprofits, and commercial
businesses. Changing regulations, changing customer needs, new direction set by
changing leadership, and the necessity to launch bigger, better, different
products more and more quickly mean changes are inevitable. These sit...

Internships can provide some great learning opportunities. I was lucky enough to learn one of the best lessons on the first day of the very first internship of mine. My mentor at the time asked that, for the first 4 weeks, I invest time in every aspect of his business to learn how everything functions. I thought he was insane yet it was one of the ...

Agile is an attractive word. It means swiftness with discipline, with an emphasis on alertness to change in one’s external surroundings and quickly responding to change as needed.
The word I want to focus on from above is "external". A prime example of the difference between internal (controlled) and external (un-controlled) is an operating enter...

I have been delivering projects successfully since the early 80s. Back then, we didn't have business rules, we had formal logical data models, entity life histories, data constraints, and data flow diagrams. In general, all the necessary business constraints got captured properly and implemented. Some of these deliveries actually passed acceptance ...

A Promise to have a Conversation
I’ve been writing user stories for a couple of years now, and the best way I’ve heard how to describe them is that they are a promise to have a conversation. Enough information should be written down to give the reader an idea of what the gist of the story is (and to be able to roughly estimate a story point ...

On a recent client’s project, we were asked to help in the effort of creating a system to automate much of the current manual processes. In order to capture the requirements this also meant that we were documenting the business rules that were currently being used. When I started the project, I did not have a complete understanding...

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As we start a new year many of us will take the time to reflect on our accomplishments from 2012 and plan our goals for 2013. We can set small or large goals. goals that will be accomplished quickly or could take several years. For 2013, I think Business Analysts should look to go beyond our traditional boundaries and set audacious goals.
Merriam-...

Recently, I was asked by the IIBA to present a talk at one of their chapter meetings. I am reprinting here my response to that invitation in the hope that it will begin a conversation with fellow EEPs and BAs about an area of great concern to the profession.
Hi xx
…. Regarding the IIBA talk, there is another issue that I am considering. It's p...

Continuing the ABC series for Business Analysts, Howard Podeswa created the next installment titled "BA ABCs: “C” is for Class Diagram" as an article rather than a blog post. You can find the article here: BA ABCs: “C” is for Class Diagram Here are the previous two posts: BA ABCs: “A” is for Activity Diagram BA ABCs: “B” is for BPMN